Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  In two ways the situation of Dutch Jewry was different from that of other Western countries at the onset of the German occupation. Whereas the Jews of Belgium were predominantly foreign and one-half of the French community was not native, in the Netherlands the twenty thousand foreign Jews represented only one-seventh of the Jewish population in May 1940. Moreover, even if some measure of traditionally religious anti-Semitism lingered in the rural areas of Holland, in Amsterdam—where half the Jews of the country were concentrated—and in larger cities in general—anti-Jewish feelings did not lead to public intolerance, although traditional religious anti-Judaism persisted among a majority of Dutch Protestants and Catholics. Even Anton Mussert’s Dutch Nazi Party counted some Jewish members (about one hundred) before the Germans arrived.228

  During the first months of the occupation, German domination seemed relatively mild. The Dutch were considered a kindred race and, ultimately, they would be integrated in the greater community of Nordic nations. The two top Nazi envoys to Holland, both Austrians, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Higher SS and Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter (Himmler’s delegate in The Hague), did not foresee any major difficulties in handling the Dutch population and its Jews. Queen Wilhelmina and the government had fled to London, but current affairs were impeccably run by a model bureaucracy under the guidance of the so-called College of the Secretaries-General (the highest-ranking officials in every ministry), with the help of an obedient and zealous civil service, an efficient police force, and the full cooperation of all local authorities. The Germans became the supervisors of a smoothly working administrative system.229

  The Dutch political scene was not unfavorable to the occupiers either. Mussert’s party (NSB) never became a significant political force; it was vocal, it supplied henchmen to the Germans, but all in all it remained peripheral, somewhat like the collaborationist parties in occupied France. Yet, soon after the defeat, a new party, the Dutch Union (Nederlandse Unie), gained wide support among the population received tentative acceptance from the Germans and initiated a policy of moderate collaboration not very different from the Vichy line.

  It was in this “conciliatory” climate that the first anti-Jewish measures were imposed by the Germans throughout the summer of 1940. They did not seem ominous: air raid protection teams would no longer include Jews: Jews were forbidden to work in Germany; Jews in the civil service could not be promoted, and no new appointments of Jews were allowed. But in October the first standard German steps were taken: By the middle of the month all civil servants had to fill out forms about their racial origin. On October 22, 1940, the edict defining Jews was proclaimed.230

  The definition of who was a Jew was essentially identical to that of the Nuremberg laws, except in regard to the cut-off date for mixed breeds: A person was considered Jewish if descending from three or more grandparents of the Jewish religion. A person descending from two Jewish grandparents was considered a mixed breed of the first degree if not married to a Jewish spouse or belonging to the Jewish faith on May 9, 1940 (the eve of the German attack in the West); otherwise that person was Jewish.

  From this early stage the secretaries-general and the civil service as a whole displayed the compliance that would later have fateful consequences. Although some civil servants had qualms about the anticonstitutional aspect of the forms regarding their racial origin, the highest officials of the land decided to accept them. The secretary-general of the Department of the Interior, K. J. Fredericks, led the way: Out of some 240,000 civil servants, apparently fewer than 20 refused to fill out the questionnaire.231 By mid-November all Jewish civil servants had been dismissed, and the Dutch Supreme Court voted by a majority of 12 to 5 to dismiss its own president, the Jew Lodewijk E. Visser.232

  On October 21, 1940, the registration of Jewish businesses began. It was followed on January 10, 1941, by the compulsory registration of the Jews themselves; nearly everyone complied. In the Netherlands, moreover, personal identification had become an unusually precise and foolproof system, “improved” even further regarding Jews (after the German registration order) due to the zeal and talent of the head of the “State Inspectorate of Population Registers,” Jacob Lentz. The forging of identity papers became almost impossible until the very last year of the war.233

  In Amsterdam the city council and the municipal personnel at first went beyond the call of duty in obeying German demands: Although Dutch law did not compel them to fill out declarations of Aryan descent, all volunteered to do so in January 1941.234 Yet when the Germans mentioned the possibility of establishing a ghetto in the city, the council expressed its opposition. In the meantime, however, a situation was developing that in principle should have helped the German plans. Mussert’s Dutch Nazis, encouraged by the Germans, particularly by Seyss-Inquart’s delegate in Amsterdam, Dr. H. Böhmcker, initiated scuffles in the Jewish area of the city. On February 19, 1941, the owners of the Koco (Kohn and Cahn) ice-cream parlor in south Amsterdam mistook a German police unit for Dutch Nazis and sprayed them with ammonium gas.235 Three days later the Germans sealed off the Jewish quarter of the city and arrested 389 young Jewish men, whom they deported to Buchenwald and then to Mauthausen: One survived.

  On November 26, 1940, shortly after the dismissal of all Jewish civil servants, Professor R. P. Cleveringa, the dean of the Law School at the University of Leiden, the oldest Dutch university, addressed a meeting in the main auditorium, so packed with faculty and students that the speech had to be transmitted by loudspeaker to an adjacent hall. He spoke in honor of his Jewish colleague, Professor E. M. Meijers, who, like all other Jewish civil servants, had been dismissed on German orders on November 15. “Their [the Germans’] actions are beneath contempt,” Cleveringa declared. “All I ask is that we may dismiss them from our sight and gaze instead at the heights, up to that radiant figure in whose honor we are assembled here…. This noble son of our people, this man, this father to his students, this scholar, whom usurpers have suspended from his duties…. A man who, as all of us know, belongs here and, God willing, shall return to us.”236 On the afternoon of that day the students in Leiden and Delft started a strike. Both universities were closed on German orders on November 29, 1940, and some of the protesters, including Dean Cleveringa, were arrested.237

  The Germans had their own way of explaining the situation. In a report of January 16, 1941, on the situation in the Netherlands, the representative of the Foreign Ministry in The Hague, Otto Bene, sent a description of the events in the universities to the Wilhelmstrasse: “Introduction of the anti-Jewish laws has provoked considerable unrest, owing to the strong influences of the Jews on the intellectual life of the Netherlands, especially in the university cities of Leiden and Delft, where students under the leadership of Jewish students and probably, as a result of behind-the-scenes manipulations of the Jewish professors affected, allowed themselves to be carried away to stage demonstrations which resulted in the closing of the two universities.”238

  But protest was not limited to the academic elites. A month before the manifestations in Leiden, the Dutch Protestant Churches (Reformed Churches) and the Mennonites—with the telling exception of the small Lutheran Church of the Netherlands (that is, the same denomination as that of the vast majority of German Protestants) and the Dutch Catholic Church—addressed a jointly signed letter to Seyss-Inquart. After evoking Christian charity and the issue of converted Jews, the letter continued: “Finally, this issue [the statute about the Jews and the expulsion of Jews from public service] has also brought profound dismay because it applies to the people from which the Savior is born, the object of the prayers of all Christians and the one they recognize [as] their Master and King. For all these reasons, we turn to your Excellency, with the urgent request to take the necessary steps to cancel the aforementioned measures.”

  The last sentence may have been particularly galling for the Reichskommissar: “Besides, we wish to recall the solemn promise given by your Excellency to respect our national
identity and not to impose on us a way of thinking that is foreign to us.”

  The text of the letter was read from the pulpits of all Reformed temples on the following Sunday.239 Simultaneously the first protest articles appeared in the Dutch clandestine press. Thus a December 1940 issue of the pro-Communist De Waarheid (Truth) did not mince words: “Dutch workers and all freedom-loving Dutchmen should fight this imported poison of hate against the Jews.”240 A few months later, in February 1941, Het Parool joined the protest and so, one after another, did all major clandestine publications in Holland.241 And, as we shall see in the next chapter, in February 1941 Dutch workers would go on strike in Amsterdam and other cities to protest German anti-Jewish brutality.

  Historically puzzling is the fact that almost none of this occurred in France. From the reports sent by the directors of lycées (high schools) to the Ministry of Education it appears that all Jewish professors left “without incident”—that is, without any public manifestation of sympathy or open protest by either colleagues or students.242 French academic institutions of higher learning preempted both Vichy and the Germans in expelling their Jewish faculty members, as we saw; publishers and publications vied for German or Vichy authorizations to resume their activities and showed open readiness for “self-censorship.” And, as we also noted, the assembly of French cardinals and archbishops favored the limitation of Jewish rights even before Vichy introduced its statute. The French student unions did organize a pro–de Gaulle rally in Paris, on November 11, 1940, but in the leaflets distributed during the demonstration, not a word appeared regarding the measures taken against the Jews in both zones of the country.243

  IX

  When, in May 1940, the Klemperers were forced to move into a “Jews’ house,” Victor commented: “It is still quite impossible to know whether a tolerable existence can be established here.”244

  In that summer of 1940, “tolerable” had a very different meaning for the inhabitants of the Jewish quarters or ghettos in former Poland; it had a different meaning for various categories of Jews in the Reich—and, for those among them who, although having been identified as full Jews, lived in “privileged mixed marriages,”245 or again for mixed breeds of the first or second degree; it had a different meaning for the Jews in Western countries who lived under direct German control and for those who lived in Vichy France, or, for the most favored of all, those who had managed to settle in the Italian-occupied zone in southeastern France. For all, however, growing isolation, anxiety regarding ever-darker prospects, and complete uncertainty about what the future held in store seeped into everyday life.

  Increasingly the Jews of occupied Eastern Europe would be convinced that nobody cared about their fate. Thus, in a letter sent from Warsaw in December 1940 to members of her movement in Eretz Israel, Zivia Lubetkin—who some two years later was to become one of the organizers of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—expressed her growing despair about this abandonment: “More than once, I have decided not to write to you anymore…. I will not describe here what I am going through, but I want you to know that even one word of comfort from you would have sufficed…. To my regret, however, I have to accept your silence, but I will never forgive it.”246

  The same uncertainty, the same dread about what the future held in store, the same feeling that the closest friends living peacefully in the free world were not doing enough, if anything at all, recurred as a constant yet restrained leitmotif in the letters that the German philosopher and literary scholar Walter Benjamin was sending from France. After the Germans occupied Paris, he had found a temporary refuge in the small pilgrimage town of Lourdes, near the Spanish border.

  “My dear Teddy,” he wrote on August 2, 1940, to his longtime friend, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had emigrated from Germany to New York via Paris, “The total uncertainty about what the next day, the next hour is about to bring has dominated my existence for several weeks. I am condemned to read each newspaper (they are published on one single page) as a notification addressed directly to me and to perceive in each radio broadcast the voice of a messenger of misfortune. For some time now it has been impossible for a foreigner to obtain permission to change location. Therefore, I entirely depend on what you will be able to achieve from the outside…. My fear is that the time at our disposal could be much more limited than we supposed.”247

  Benjamin received an American visa from the consulate in Marseilles, probably within the nonquota category established by the Emergency Rescue Committee. He also had possession of a transit visa through Spain to Portugal. Normally he would have had no difficulty in crossing the French-Spanish border, notwithstanding the refusal of French authorities to grant exit visas. But by sheer bad luck, on September 26, 1940, the day on which Benjamin and his group arrived at the border, at Port Bou, the Spanish guards refused to recognize visas issued by the American consulate in Marseilles.

  In January 1940 a still-defiant Benjamin was urging his friend, the historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, to publish the lectures he was giving at the time in New York: “Every line that we publish nowadays—as uncertain as the future to which we transmit it may be—is a victory forced upon the powers of darkness.248 At the Spanish border, carrying an unpublished manuscript in a briefcase that was never found, too ill, too exhausted, and mainly too desperate to try and cross the border once again, Benjamin killed himself.249

  CHAPTER III

  December 1940–June 1941

  On June 15, 1941, in the afternoon, a week before the beginning of the German assault against the Soviet Union, Goebbels was summoned to the Reich Chancellery: Hitler, it seems, wished to get the right support from his most fanatically devoted underling.

  The Nazi leader’s ruminations were first and foremost an exercise in self-reassurance: “The most powerful attack that history had ever seen,” the minister recorded. “What happened to Napoleon would not repeat itself…the Führer estimated that the entire campaign would take approximately 4 months; I think it will be much less. We stand on the eve of an unparalleled victory.” In Goebbels’s view, the attack was a vital necessity for global strategic reasons and no less so on ideological grounds: “It is not Czarism that will be brought back to Russia; an authentic socialism will replace Judeo-bolshevism. Every old Nazi will rejoice at the opportunity of witnessing these events. The pact with Russia was in fact a stain on our shield…what we have fought against throughout our life, we shall now exterminate. I say this to the Führer and he completely agrees with me.”1

  Suddenly Hitler added a comment as unexpected as it was atypical: “The Führer says,” Goebbels recorded, “whether we are right or wrong, we must win. This is the only way. And it is right, moral and necessary. And once we have won, who will ask us about the methods. In any case, we have so much to account for that we must win; otherwise our whole people—and we in the first place, and all that we love—would be erased” [Wir haben sowieso soviel auf dem Kerbholz, dass wir siegen müssen, weil sonst unser ganzes Volk, wir an der Spitze mit allem was uns lieb ist, ausradiert würde.]2 From that point on, in other words, there was no way back.

  I

  Whether in the summer of 1940 Hitler had ever seriously considered the invasion of the British Isles (Operation Sea Lion) remains a moot question. Throughout those same months the onslaught of the Luftwaffe against Britain’s coastal defenses did not achieve the essential precondition for a landing: control of the skies over southern England. The massive bombing of cities that followed, mainly the raids on London (the Blitz), did not break the population’s morale, and in the fall the Battle of Britain was turning to the advantage of the Royal Air Force.

  At the same time Hitler was considering his alternative strategy. After the defeat of France and the British rejection of his “peace proposal,” the Nazi leader mentioned the global strategic impact of an attack against the Soviet Union on several occasions, particularly in the course of the military conference at the Berghof, on July 31, 1940. According to Halder’s n
otes, Hitler’s argument ran as follows: “England’s hope is Russia and America. If hope in Russia is eliminated, America also is eliminated, because enormous increase in the importance of Japan in the Far East will result from the elimination of Russia.”3

  The overall strategic framework was of course indissolubly linked, as we shall see, to Hitler’s unchanged ideological hatred of Bolshevism (of Judeo-Bolshevism, as he would mostly perceive it) and to the more traditional German aspiration to dominate the spaces of the East and their boundless reserves of raw materials. Only control of this economic potential would turn the Reich into an unassailable power, poised to dominate the world.

  The Tripartite Pact, signed on September 27, 1940, between Germany, Italy, and Japan, was meant as a warning to the United States no less than to the Soviet Union.4 But when, in mid-November 1940, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, arrived in Berlin for negotiations and Hitler suggested a common front against Great Britain and the United States by turning the Tripartite Pact into a “Quadripartite” one, the Nazi leader had probably already made up his mind. In any case Molotov steadily brought the discussions back to concrete issues: the full implementation of the 1939 agreement about the Soviet “sphere of interest,” mainly in the Balkans (Bulgaria) and regarding Finland.